ladies, the name over which we had just felt friction. "Mrs.
Brissenden's quite fabulous."

He appeared to have strayed, in our interval, far. "'Fabulous'?"

"Why, for the figure that, by candle-light and in cloth-of-silver and
diamonds, she is still able to make."

"Oh dear, yes!" He showed as relieved to be able to see what I meant.
"She has grown so very much less plain."

But that wasn't at all what I meant. "Ah," I said, "you put it the
other way at Paddington--which was much more the right one."

He had quite forgotten. "How then did I put it?"

As he had done before, I got rid of my ash. "She hasn't grown very much
less plain. She has only grown very much less old."

"Ah, well," he laughed, but as if his interest had quickly dropped,
"youth is--comparatively speaking--beauty."

"Oh, not always. Look at poor Briss himself."

"Well, if you like better, beauty is youth."

"Not always, either," I returned. "Certainly only when it _is_ beauty.
To see how little it may be either, look," I repeated, "at poor Briss."

"I thought you told me just now not to!" He rose at last in his
impatience.

"Well, at present you can."

I also got up, the other men at the same moment moved, and the subject
of our reference stood in view. This indeed was but briefly, for, as if
to examine a picture behind him, the personage in question suddenly
turned his back. Long, however, had had time to take him in and then to
decide. "I've looked. What then?"

"You don't see anything?"

"Nothing."

"Not what everyone else must?"

"No, confound you!"

I already felt that, to be so tortuous, he must have had a reason, and
the search for his reason was what, from this moment, drew me on. I had
in fact half guessed it as we stood there. But this only made me the
more explanatory. "It isn't really, however, that Brissenden has grown
less lovely--it's only that he has grown less young."

To which my friend, as we quitted the room, replied simply: "Oh!"

The effect I have mentioned was, none the less, too absurd. The poor
youth's back, before us, still as if consciously presented, confessed to
the burden of time. "How old," I continued, "did we make out this
afternoon that he would be?"

"That who would?"

"Why, poor Briss."

He fairly pulled up in our march. "Have you got him on the brain?"

"Don't I seem to remember, my dear man, that it was you yourself who
knew? He's thirty at the most. He can't possibly be more. And th